


Weights and Measures

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, F/M, Operation Genoa, Season/Series 02, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 09:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1852546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's the weight of the past against the measure of the present? Will and MacKenzie, six weeks post Genoa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weights and Measures

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Just archiving this before it gets lost in the depths of my tumblr. If you follow me there, you've already seen it.

He thought that he knew her. That even after she came back, a thousand little things different, out of place just an inch off-center, Will thought that he knew her. Even though her hair changed, her heels were shorter, her skirts longer, eyes lined and the corners of her mouth pinched, she was MacKenzie McHale and Will prided himself on knowing her better than anyone else, that no one else could know her better and she’d suffer it, because she’d never have him.

Six weeks after they retract Genoa he’s no longer certain that  _anyone_ knows Mac.

She drowns herself in more liquor than he’s ever seen her drink, leaning on Jim’s shoulder in a dark corner while recounting in a too-loud voice pitching face-first off a table in hotel bar in Kabul, breaking her nose. Will finds himself staring at her in the low light, looking at the bridge of her nose, letting her voice muffle into a slurry of hard syllables and self-deprecating humor.

“You were drunk,” Jim says.

Mac nods, contemplating her empty glass. “I was drunk,” she says wistfully, something small and fragile in her eyes dimming before fluttering out entirely. “It was bombed the next week, wasn’t it?” she inquires of Jim, softly.

“You were at the Serena Hotel in 2008?” Tess asks, voice hushed in awe.

Will wants to tell them to shut up, because there’s a slight shift in the bridge of Mac’s nose that he’s taken nearly three years to notice.  _Stop digging,_ he wants to tell them, when she shifts slightly, trying to right herself straighter, smiles uneasily.

But she answers their questions as easily as she wrote her letter of resignation in front of him the other night, as easily as she tried to steer him into firing her. Answers the staff’s questions, jokes about dancing on bars in Germany with Jim and walking around military bases in nothing but her pants, laughs too bitterly about being caught inside blast radiuses and negotiating with handlers and contacts and sources, and stops short when Gary asks her why she came home.

Mac shrugs.

Maggie notices, though, and he can’t unsee it. “I can’t imagine you dancing on a bar—”

Will wonders if Mac has told them about her childhood, the years scattered and cut between DC and Athens, Istanbul and Moscow and Berlin. If they know she speaks Russian fluently and spent time in Chechnya, if it surprised them as much as it did the first time she switched to Urdu in front of him, during a pre-interview with a high-ranking Pakistani official. And then shrugged at him over his desk and the telephone, apologetic, and it was like she disappeared from him.

MacKenzie dances on bars.

 

* * *

 

She seems drunker out on the sidewalk than sitting down in the lounge, so he pretends not to notice when she hangs onto him for balance. That, he knows, and thinks Jim doesn’t. Jim waved goodbye to her at the door, let her hail a cab herself.

“I can’t see it,” he tells her, still looking at the bridge of her nose. “How badly was it broken?”

She shrugs, shifting her weight just off her center of gravity. “There are plastic surgeons in Kabul.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Heaving a sigh, she lets go of his arm and weaves between passers-by, trying to wave him away when he follows.

“Mac?”

“Why does it matter?” she asks, blinking rapidly. “Why does any of it fucking matter, Will? You haven’t asked me anything about it… ever. I broke my nose. Broke a few fingers and toes. Got stabbed. That was my fault too, and I didn’t have to ask them to fire me, that time. I guess you have a talent for cruelty that CNN executives lack.”

He balks. “That’s not why I’m—Mac. Don’t—”

“Don’t tell me we’ll get through this together, I’ll throw up. Which is a credible threat, at the moment,” she says, staggering away from him, back across the street to the AWM building. “I’m not quite up to par with the days I was drinking to keep up with my self-loathing.” Freezing, she wobbles. And then collects herself, moving on. “Don’t worry about that. Please fire me?”

 

* * *

 

He keeps the lights in her bathroom off, instead leaving the door to her office cracked, holding her hair back while she dry-heaves. The MacKenzie he knew was proud of knowing her limits, always pursuing them to their fullest but leaving beyond that be. He hasn’t done this for anyone since law school, and figures the fact that he smells like half a pack of cigarettes isn’t helping her but he’s not leaving her, either.

When she’s finished she’s still drunk enough to lie on the bathroom floor, her head pillowed in his lap.

“We were set up,” she mumbles, vomit drying on her lips. “Blackwater guards. We were trying to… trying to write a whistleblower piece, and they bought someone off to lead us into the wrong crowd at a protest to meet with a ‘source.’ I only took me down, though.”

Idly, she picks up his hand off her forehead, tracing the spaces between his fingers with her own.

“That’s what Nina had on me.” Her voice is small, and afraid, and he doesn’t like it. Tipping his head back against the tile wall, he breathes out through pursed lips, counting to ten. “It wasn’t almost just me, though. I got them out. I didn’t get them out this time.”

“Mac—” he protests, tamping down on the instinct to take his hand away from hers.

“Ever wonder if the world would be better off without you…?” she asks slowly, voice garbled and high, sounding too much like an inquisitive child. “I have. A lot, Billy. Lots and lots.”

Will counts to ten again, pressing the hand that she hasn’t stolen down against the cold floor. Hard floor. Unforgiving floor. And banishes the whole idea of Mac, gentled and bleeding, from his mind.  _Don’t_ , he wants to tell her. But it’s not his place to tell her. He doesn’t want it to be his place to tell her, to hold her like this. She’s not the same woman he fell in love with and it—whatever the feeling is—sinks its hooks into him and tugs his heart into his stomach.

The fact that it bothers him. That in many ways, it doesn’t. 

“I’m not firing you, Mac.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


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